Saturday, March 06, 2010

.....

I have never been a great fan of titles. They seem overtly grand , and eventually, empty and constricting. They force you to have a predecided notion of what you are about to do, which I find to be quite beyond me. I never seem to have an idea about what I'll be thinking about ten minutes later. Which is weird, because I would think that if you ask yourself the question "What will I be thinking of ten minutes from now", there is a good chance that you will be thinking about how you could predict the answer to such a question ten minutes from the time when you asked yourself that question.

I can say though, that inspite of what I think, this certainly isnt what happens with me. Ive often tried to carry out this gedanken. When I was a kid, I used to think that say suppose you ask yourself, what'll I be thinking ten minutes from now, and you start thinking about an answer to this question/ how you can predict the answer to such a question, then you will be trapped in this thought stream for eternity. Say suppose you ask yourself this question. One of two things happen. Either, you make a prediction in ten minutes, and then wait to see if your prediction is true. But by virtue of the fat that you have asked yourself this question, ten minutes from the time when you ask yourself this question, your brain will be thinking about "measuring" your thought, but then the brain isnt thinking what you thought it would be thinking, but rather it is thinking about how to measure whatever thought crosses it :O. So you repeat the experiment :P over and over and over again.

The other possibility is, that you say to yourself, that i'll keep at how to find an answer to questions of this kind , no matter how long it takes. So you know at the outset what you will be thinking of ten minutes from now. But the trouble is, that you do not "see" yourself thinking 10 minutes from now. You are too busy thinking about how to predict what you will be thinking about in ten minutes. So you have no way to confirm that you really were thinking about what you really thought you would be thinking about in ten minutes. Say suppose that after many, many years, you come up with an answer that makes sense :P then, again as soon as you try to confirm your theory, you run into the situation in the previous paragraph. So your theory fails

So. What will you be thinking about in ten minutes :P?

6 Comments:

Blogger Saby said...

abe blog mein smileys mat use karo..bekaar lagta hai./..

3:44 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh my! You must think a lot. I don't!

8:49 PM  
Blogger liszt85 said...

Though not a direct answer to your question, my advisor just wrote a paper on a dimensionality study of natural language discourse. I then extended that to a similar study on images that can be considered as representative of our episodic memory (they were taken automatically, without user intervention). Very similar correlation structure (and a 2 scale structure, low dimension at low dist and high at larger dist). It looks like there are constraints on how ideas progress and that is possibly not a constraint imposed by the cognitive system but probably is a constraint that is imposed by the very way in which we encounter them in the first place! To give you an easy to understand analogy: Babies see things that they explore fuzzy.. is it a problem with their eyesight? The answer lies in the length of their hands :P Similar is the case with our cognitive system, it seems.. Anyway, this went on a slight tangent but it might be connected ultimately to what you asked.

3:24 PM  
Blogger Saby said...

I was just reading the post again and it went " I am not a big fan of titties" and I thought, wtf happened to you?! :P

9:53 PM  
Blogger Amy said...

I appreciate your PO very much the picture with the article. Continues to refuel!!

2:39 AM  
Blogger Pouch said...

how are U?

2:58 AM  

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